adventures of a typical high school student

Hello everyone!

Today I’m going to be giving a quick overview of my writing process for the poems I post on this blog. It’s a little different than my writing process if I’m writing poems for myself/for another purpose and obviously it’s somewhat similar to my normal blog post writing process (I’ve written a post on that before as well!) so I’m not going to go into too much detail. Keep on reading if you want to find out how I write the poems I post each week!

1. Do the normal blog set-up. I figure out what I’m going to write a poem about based on inspiration/prompts/feelings from the day, choose my tags, find a matching picture on Unsplash.com, the works.
2. Sometimes I come up with a title before writing the poem, and sometimes I come up with it after. I also might tweak it after finishing the poem– it all depends how much I have planned in my head when I start writing.
3. I write the poem! I experiment with a few different structures of poems on here, but I start out just doing a free verse outline of what I want the poem to be. I try to get out all my thoughts quickly and edit them afterwards. I make sure to write it in the “Verse” block on the WordPress editor.
4. I edit the spacing/line breaks of the poem to my liking.
5. I check the poem for possible confusing lines or grammar mistakes. I honestly don’t revise my poems on this blog beyond that, as it’s kind of a spur-of-the-moment free write thing. I recognize that lots of the poems on here are far from perfect, but I think there’s something beautiful in that as well. Feel free to disagree: I fully believe there’s still a time and place for raw, unpolished writing, and on a small personal blog this is one of those places. 🙂
6. I write the little blurb after the poem. Sometimes I’ll explain the backstory/inspiration to the poem, sometimes not. It depends on how much clarification I think it needs. I’ll also do my normal call-to-action asking for feedback and writing challenges, and send you off with well wishes.

That’s all there is to it! It’s definitely not as intense of a writing process as when I’m trying to write and polish a more serious, longer piece. I love getting creative on here and writing little image poems, but I do plan on posting some longer and experimental poems in the future. Please let me know if there’s other types of poems you would like to see me explore. Stay safe and healthy out there.

Brooke